It might be possible to be more hopeful about the Obama administration if the cancer on this presidency were removed

With Thursday morning update:
Some smart pundits surprise me

"We have a cancer--within, close to the Presidency, that's growing. It's growing daily. It's compounding, it grows geometrically now because it compounds itself."

-- White House Counsel John Dean to President

Richard Nixon, March 21, 1973

by Ken

I know there's a tremendous clamor for my election post-mortems. Okay, "tremendous clamor" may be a slight overstatement. Well, it remains entirely possible that somebody out there is waiting on pins and needles.

As it happens, I have very little to add to my pre-mortems. Given how little was slated to happen of tea-leaf-readable significance, it was hardly going out on a limb to predict that the lesson drawn in the Village would be the erroneous one: that it's time for everyone to make a mad dash for the mythical Center -- everyone, that is, except the rampaging teabaggers, who are poised to inherit the earth. Why was that a safe prediction? Because that's the only lesson the Villagers ever admit.

Of course the totally kaput Creigh Deeds gubernatorial campaign in Virginia surely argues the opposite lesson: that Democrats are going to have an increasingly difficult time winning elections while standing for nothing, especially against candidates like now-Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell who have their shit together, projecting confidence to an electorate that will have plenty of time to learn how scary this guy is once he moves into the Executive Mansion. After Deeds's seemingly flawless Democratic primary campaign, he seemed to shrivel into a ghost fleeing his own shadow. Voters across Virginia's political spectrum noticed.

The one big surprise yesterday was the surprisingly poor showing of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose take-no-prisoners campaign was clearly designed to lead to a coronation rather than mere reelection. What I'm seeing now is a 50.61%-to-46.04% margin over City Comptroller Bill Thompson, which is a shocker to one and all. I don't think I would have wanted to be around the mayor today, with his famously short fuse. I like to think he had all those high-price consultants he bought up -- to make sure none of them would be available to potential opponents -- out in City Hall Park today on trash pickup detail.

I kind of suspected something might be afoot when I voted yesterday on the way to work. There were actually people other than the election officials at my polling place. There is, of course, some feeling that a tide of anti-rich-guys feeling in the land worked against both Mayor Bloomberg and, across the river, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, perhaps dooming his reelection bid.

I think I made my position about the mayor clear ("Why I wouldn't vote for Mayor Bloomberg if he paid me -- and you know, that's not such a bad idea, Mr. Mayor"). I had no trouble voting for Bill Thompson, whom I've always seen to be an exceptionally decent, thoughtful pol. (Mayor Bloomberg is on record thinking pretty much the same thing, until it suited his purposes to spend kajillons of Bloomberg-bucks on character assassination that he surely knows to have been totally without merit. It was just one of the things that made the Bloomberg campaign one of near-Nixonian hatefulness.)

The most interesting post-mortem to the mayoral race is the tart response from an unnamed White House slasher to the post-election speculation of New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, himself a candidate for the Democratic mayoral nomination until he was blown out by the Bloomberg Billions, as to what might have happened if the Democratic mayoral candidate had gotten a tiny bit of support from traditional Democratic bases, like the Democratic president. I think it's worth quoting a bit of Ben Smith's Politico account:

Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s stunningly narrow re-election in New York was a moral defeat for the billionaire incumbent, and a profound embarrassment for a Democratic establishment – from the White House on down — that abandoned his rival, City Comptroller Bill Thompson, as a hopeless loser.

Bloomberg’s meager five-point win left Democrats pondering what might have been if New York’s Democratic donors hadn’t turned their back on Thompson, if its politicians had worked for him, and most of all if President Barack Obama had offered anything more than the lamest words of praise.

“Maybe one of those Corzine trips could have been better spent in New York. Who knows?" remarked New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, who weighed his own run for mayor, referring to the White House’s devout attention to the New Jersey contest.

“Maybe Anthony Weiner should have manned-up and run against Michael Bloomberg,” shot back a White House official, who attributed the night’s results across the board to anti-incumbent fervor.

CONFIDENTIAL TO MASTER RAHM: When even the drones at Politico can see through you, you're pretty darned transparent.

Now I suppose it's possible that the White House official in question wasn't Master Rahm, and that there are multiple such vicious, plug-ignorant, gutless shitheads wandering around the building. But I wonder if it's really possible to wander the halls of the White House without interference from the Master's hall monitors. I don't think there's any question that the spirit is pure Rahm -- not only wrong on the facts, but imbued with his trademark ignoramus sociopath's conception of "manhood."

Around DWT, Master Rahm is of course traditionally close to Public Enemy No. 1. For those who are coming in late, this morning Jane Hamsher took a useful stroll down Emanuel Memory Lane, highlighting some of the Master's more memorably massive misreadings of the American electorate and wondering, "Is Rahm Emanuel Orchestrating 2010 Democratic Massacre?," concluding:

Rahm doesn’t think about Democratic turnout. His reputation for “winning a Democratic majority” rests on his ability as a self-promoter to take credit for victories that happened in spite of him. The truth is that his “act more like Republicans” strategy just hasn’t worked out, and we’re getting whiffs of the disaster it spells for Democrats who follow it.

Now I spoke at the outset of my election "pre-mortems," plural. And rather more than the nuts-and-bolts political one I've already referenced, the one I want to call attention to post-mortem is the sad hash I made of Drew Westen's terrific piece about the president's failure of leadership in the White House. If you haven't read the Westen piece, I encourage you to. And I have to repeat the quote I pulled out of it yesterday:

Genuine leadership means setting the agenda. It means taking tough stands. It means telling people the truth forcefully and evocatively in a way that makes them want to listen and act. It means drawing lines in the sand when you must, and refusing to compromise your values even if you have to compromise on some of the policies born of those values when you have no other choice. It means fighting for what you believe in and taking on powerful vested interests when people's lives and livelihoods are at stake. And it means looking backward at the past so you don't make the same mistakes, looking sideways at alternatives so you know your options, and using that vision to move the nation forward.

Leadership is a quality Barack Obama showed on the campaign trail. It is a quality he has failed to show as president.

I do want to be careful here, because, as I've indicated repeatedly, I still don't know what it is that President Obama actually believes in, or what he actually hopes to achieve during his time in office. Certainly the primary focus he's had to give to the economic meltdown may have diverted him from his other aspirations. Or, looking at the timid half-measures he took on the economy, does his response to the meltdown tell us perhaps more about his intentions? As I wrote yesterday, I had no trouble identifying with Cenk Uygur's uncertainty as to who and what the president really is -- someone we can rally behind, or someone who --

just played us to get elected and will give us just enough change to placate the masses but leave the system completely intact. That's the kind of guy who would push for a trigger for the public option and pretend he actually gave you the public option. It's not about the trigger, it's not about the public option it's not even about health care reform -- it's what it says about him. Is he playing the politicians and lobbyists in Washington or is he playing us?

Unfortunately, for me the Master Rahm Factor is looming ever larger here. Readers who were with us during last year's post-election euphoria may recall that both Howie and I had premonitions of disaster when it became known that the president-elect was trying to lasso his old Chicago pal into taking the job of White House chief of staff. This is a man whose only known political philosophy is to keep your tongue close to the butt cracks of the Rich and Powerful, because only they can make you a little richer and more powerful. He has no known political ethics.

I find it hard to imagine that there's anything I know about Master Rahm that the president doesn't, and this discourages me deeply when I contemplate the future of this presidency. As a number of wise commentators pointed out, even with the economic woes, this administration had a small window of opportunity for historic progressive change -- on the order of what President Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to wrest out of the depths of the Great Depression, or President Lyndon B. Johnson was able to drive through Dixiecrat obstruction in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy -- but those windows are historically small.

That window of opportunity cried out for exactly the kind of leadership Drew Westen describes so eloquently. I'm afraid that window is closed now. Which doesn't mean that it's impossible to accomplish anything, just not the major change that might once have been possible, and about which Candidate Obama seemed so encouraging. If President Obama has serious ambitions for his time in office, whether he can realize any of them may depend in good part on an answer to the question: Is Rahm Emanuel the cancer on this presidency, or is this presidency itself the cancer?

Of course, if there's no will to remove the cancer, maybe it doesn't matter after all.


THURSDAY MORNING UPDATE: TWO SPECIMENS
OF PUNDITRY I'M INCLINED TO TAKE SERIOUSLY

Here I've been insisting that the punditocracy was going to make a noisy nothing out of nothing much from the election results, and straightaway in this morning's Washington Post I'm doubly surprised. I don't say that I agree with every word, but I take both these pieces seriously:

In Lessons from Virginia for the GOP, former RNC chairman ED GILLESPIE, who served as general chairman of Virginia Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell's campaign, offers five "pages" that "Republicans nationally would do well to take from McDonnell's playbook":

-- Convert conservative principles into practical policies -- and finish the sentence. ("McDonnell's campaign attracted crucial independent voters by focusing on the benefits of his policies: better elementary schools, more college degrees, less time stuck in traffic, more affordable gas and electricity, and most important, jobs, jobs, jobs.")
-- Run inclusive campaigns. (The McDonnell campaign had "a broad grass-roots network of 'Women for McDonnell' in place to respond" to criticism that the candidate is against working women, and "instead of indulging in the anti-immigration rhetoric of past Republican campaigns, McDonnell appealed to the growing Hispanic and Asian American enclaves of Northern Virginia, where his message of entrepreneurship, educational opportunity and strong families resonated." As state attorney general McDonnell "forg[ed] relationships in traditionally non-Republican areas.")
-- Use language voters want from their elected leaders. (McDonnell used respectful language regarding the president, and openly disowned a GOP candidate for the state House of Delegates who called the administration "domestic terrorism at its worst" and spoke of a possible need to resort to "the bullet box.")
-- Match the left's use of technology.
-- Back strong candidates.

And in "Warnings from the angry middle," Post columnist E. J. DIONNE JR., while celebrating "the defeat of third-party Conservative Doug Hoffman by Democrat Bill Owens in New York's 23rd District" ("consider the narrative that would have been woven if Hoffman had won"), makes a good case that the results in NY-23 and in the Virginia and New Jersey governor's races indeed represent an outcry of fear and anger from a rather nonideological "middle" of America which needs to be heard:

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, as he made his way to [NJ Gov. Jon] Corzine's concession speech at a hotel here, said he sees an electorate in a dark mood. "There are two things happening," the New Jersey Democrat noted. "One is fear. The other is punishment. Voters fear for themselves and their families, and they want to punish anyone who got them into this condition."

What Lautenberg underscored is a spirit far different than the buoyant confidence Obama inspired a year ago. And the Obama change-agents, particularly the young, were notably absent from the voting booths this week. In Virginia, a state Obama carried comfortably last year, a majority of those who showed up to vote on Tuesday said they had backed John McCain. This much more Republican electorate produced a GOP landslide all the way down the Virginia ballot.

That is the fact from this week that Democrats would be fools to ignore. It's not a resurgent right wing that should trouble Obama's party. Indeed, the stronger the right's role in shaping the Republican message, the harder it will be for middle-of-the-road voters to use the Republicans to express their discontent. But for the moment, the thrill is gone from politics, and that is very dangerous for the mainstream progressive movement that Obama promised to build.

#